Abdel-Rahman, a Syrian woman in her late 20s who works at a perfume shop in Zamzam Mall in the 6th of October City, recounted the “night that changed everything.”

Alongside her family, she sat riveted to the Al Jazeera satellite channel until the early hours of Sunday morning, watching history unfold with the dramatic fall of Bashar Al-Assad's government as rebel forces seized control of Damascus while Al-Assad fled the country with his family.

Originally from Damascus, Abdel-Rahman never imagined she would witness the day when Al-Assad and his regime would disappear from the city.

“He had full control over Damascus, as did his father, Hafez Al-Assad,” she said, adding that repression there was doubled, if not tripled, compared to other governorates and cities in Syria.

"I never thought I’d live to see this day. I bought boxes of chocolate and distributed them throughout the mall,” she told Ahram Online, recounting her celebrations on Sunday morning.

Abdel-Rahman, who arrived in Cairo in 2013, follows the news of detainees being freed from prisons, hoping to hear about two of her cousins whose fate remains unknown since their arrests by security forces.

“I had already lost hope that he and his regime would be gone,” she said.

However, Abdel-Rahman's co-worker, Magda Al-Mahameed, who hails from Daraa, south of Damascus, always believed that Al-Assad and his sectarian regime would eventually fall.

“I knew he and his regime would be gone one day,” said the woman who is in her late 40s.

She fled to Egypt in late 2011 after both her brother and sister were killed by snipers in Daraa as security forces sought to suppress growing protests.

“The Daraa governorate was almost fully liberated from Al-Assad’s control, but his security forces retained control of Daraa city through an agreement with the rebel groups, provided they didn’t advance into rebel-held areas,” she explained.

Daraa is commonly described as the cradle of the Syrian revolution, with the first protests against the regime erupting there in March 2011 after 15 boys were arrested and tortured by the Al-Assad regime for drawing anti-Assad graffiti on school walls.

Having lived in Egypt longer than most Syrians in the shop, Al-Mahameed closely followed developments in her homeland.

She acknowledges the fears expressed by some Egyptians — both online and offline — that Syria might become divided after Al-Assad is ousted.

“Syria was already divided during Al-Assad’s time,” she said, describing the Syrian map with a mix of pain and realism.

“The south, including Damascus, Daraa, and Quneitra, is under Israeli control. Meanwhile, Homs, Aleppo, and Hama are under Turkish control, and Al-Raqqa and Deir Ezzor in the east are under Kurdish militias — or rather, American control because of the oil resources there,” she explained.

Despite these challenges, Abdel-Rahman and Al-Mahameed remain optimistic about Syria’s future without Al-Assad.

They agree they would need to wait at least a year before considering returning to Syria, hoping for stability and an end to Israeli attacks on the country.

Shortly after Al-Assad fled to Russia on Sunday, Israel seized the buffer zone in occupied Golan Heights and Jabal Al-Shaikh outside Golan. Moreover, hundreds of Israeli airstrikes destroyed the country's military infrastructure.

“It would be like replacing Al-Assad’s dictatorship with Israel’s occupation; both are equally terrible,” Al-Mahameed said.

Abdel-Rahman lamented that Bashar Al-Assad had treated his people with such oppression as invaders do.

Syrian migrants successfully integrated!
 

With an estimated 1.5 million Syrians in Egypt, they form the second-largest foreign community in the country after Sudanese nationals.

Officially, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has registered 148,439 Syrian refugees in Egypt, though many still await their yellow cards.

During Ahram Online’s first visit to the mall since 2016, most shops and restaurants remained Syrian-owned, with some now brand names in Egypt, and new ones opened in the ensuing years.

Some shops and restaurants already in the mall have become big chains with branches in Cairo and all over Egypt, whether fast food chains or perfume shop chains. 

Syrian refugees and migrants in Egypt have become a success story despite economic hardships and crises in recent years.

According to the General Authority for Investment and Free Zones (GAFI), Syrian investments in Egypt now exceed $800 million.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported in 2022 that 30,000 registered Syrian investors are in Egypt.

According to recently released numbers by UNHCR Egypt, the agency was overwhelmed by registration and processing applications due to the influx of Sudanese refugees since the outbreak of the Sudanese crisis in April 2023.

A young Syrian man, speaking anonymously, shared his struggles with Ahram Online.

The man said he needed to renew his expired Syrian passport to legalize his residency permit in Egypt.

In August 2023, the Egyptian government required foreigners without valid residence permits to legalize their status by March 2024. The deadline was later extended to June and then to September 2024, providing an additional year for undocumented foreigners to comply.

The man said he was ecstatic that he could finally renew his passport at the post-Bashar Syrian embassy in Cairo. Yet, the embassy temporarily suspended urgent passport renewals, citing the need to reconnect with the central passport system in Damascus.

Engaged to an Egyptian woman, the young man is desperate to resolve his residency issues to obtain identification and proceed with their marriage. “If conditions in Syria improve in the coming months, I want to take her back to meet my family,” he said.

Despite his personal struggles, he urged international search and rescue missions to save detainees in the notorious Sednaya Prison. He shared a plea from his father in Syria, posted in their family WhatsApp group, requesting it be circulated on social media.

The prisoners in Sednaya Prison were freed shortly after the young man spoke to Ahram Online.

Tales to be told!
 

Tales of Al-Assad’s prisons are widely recounted among Syrians at the mall.

Mahmoud, a young shopkeeper, recounted being detained and tortured at just 14 years old in a police station and another month at Damascus’ Criminal Security Directorate for a theft he insists he did not commit.

He still bears the marks of torture on his body, which he showed to Ahram Online while requesting not to be photographed.

“At 16, my family smuggled me out of Syria for my safety via Iran to Turkey to Greece to Egypt, despite the high cost,” he said.

While he longs to return, he says his country is not safe yet.

“We need Egypt to lead Arab nations in helping rebuild Syria,” he said confidently. “Egypt gave us refuge when we needed it most; now, it can help us rebuild,” a Syrian shop owner at the mall told Ahram Online.